Design and evaluation of a lightweight codec for error-free POF

The growing demand for higher data rates in optical communication has led to the adoption of multi-level signaling, which increases vulnerability to signal corruption. To mitigate such errors, Forward Error Correction (FEC) is commonly employed, but it imposes significant costs in terms of speed, latency, and power consumption. With its exceptionally low bit-error rate (BER), Error-Free Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) offers the potential to eliminate the need for FEC. However, existing communication standards are designed with a prerequisite for error correction, which prevents them from fully leveraging this high-fidelity environment. In this study, we propose a lightweight codec optimized for Error-Free POF. By balancing error detection capability and code length, our scheme maintains throughput within a smaller hardware footprint. We implemented this scheme on an FPGA and evaluated throughput, latency, and hardware footprint.